Norah Jones: 'I worried about being swallowed up by success'

Seven Years (2002)

To this day, it is hard to reconcile the supernatural success of Norah Jones’s debut album with the shy 22-year-old at its centre. Released in 2002, Come Away With Me went many times platinum around the world, and remains one of the biggest-selling records of all time. Jones did not enjoy the frenzy that emerged around her, particularly the media’s fixation with her relationship with the sitar great Ravi Shankar, the once-estranged father with whom she had only recently been reacquainted. “I was trying to have fun with the success, but at the same time, I was a little too worried about getting swallowed up by it all,” she says.

Today, she is calling from her Brooklyn bedroom around the start of lockdown, stealing an hour away from homeschooling her two young children to discuss the musical highlights of her career. There is a parallel there with the song she selects from Come Away With Me. Jones wrote only a few songs on her debut album, and Seven Years was not one of them; her then-boyfriend, the bassist Lee Alexander, wrote it after seeing a home video of Jones dancing as a child. “It was just a very sweet sentiment,” she says. “A child in her own world, being happy and content.”

As breezy as Come Away With Me sounded, recording it took two attempts. Jones’s voice got lost on the first recordings, although Seven Years survived those sessions. “I was in the studio with a bunch of musicians that I respected so much but just didn’t know that well,” she says. “Because I wasn’t super comfortable, maybe that’s why I didn’t come through.” A second go, aided by the renowned producer Arif Mardin, provided the goods, and made Jones the seminal jazz label Blue Note’s first pop icon.

While only a fraction older than the likes of Britney and Christina, Jones existed in an another universe, although she thinks she attended one MTV video music awards ceremony. “I felt like I was crashing a lot of parties, I’ll put it that way.” Some critics theorised that listeners were drawn to the album’s comforting vibe in the aftermath of 9/11. She disagreed at the time, “but looking back, I definitely think that could have been part of it”.

Sunrise (2004)

The only way to follow such a smash was to let go, says Jones. The dreamy Sunrise is a testament to the easy feeling she got from playing with the guitarists Kevin Breit and Adam Levy, recording her second album on a mountain in upstate New York and channelling the her love of Dolly Parton, who guested on Feels Like Home. Contradicting critics who dismissed it as bland, the New Yorker described Jones’s second album as “one big booty call” and claimed her music was all about sex. “I definitely don’t agree!” she laughs. “Though people relate to music how they relate to it, so I don’t disagree, either. In college, I had an album I liked to listen to with my boyfriend at the time. Everybody has that album, right? Fine with me if it’s one of mine.”

The more pointed criticisms sometimes got to her. “But whatever, should I crawl in a hole and not release music because of some other person?” The music industry, however, couldn’t get enough, and the “Norah effect” precipitated the signing of Amy Winehouse, Katie Melua, Joss Stone and numerous other soulful young women. Jones didn’t mind their music but was less keen on the association. “It wasn’t stuff I wanted to listen to, and when people would put me in the same category as someone else, I wouldn’t agree,” she says. “But I had to separate myself from it all. The truth is some great artists came out of that and that’s awesome.”

Rosie’s Lullaby (2007)

Jones wrote Rosie’s Lullaby while touring Australia, about a friend who was going through a hard time. But it is not hard to interpret the lyrics about a woman “feelin’ so small / At the bottom of the world” as self-reflection. “It was probably about both of us,” she admits. Jones felt “kinda depressed” when making her third album, Not Too Late. “I was lonely and sad and the world was kinda falling apart.” Touring the second album had been crazier still than the first. “I was just trying to keep together, to be honest,” she says. “I was drinking on tour, and I was never a super-destructive drinker, which is good, but I was still just drinking a lot, which is not great.” There were fun times, she recalls, and good meals, but touring for the best part of a year, “you get a little delirious”.

Looseness became a release valve. Not Too Late came together from off-the-cuff recording sessions that Jones hid from her label. She started various side projects: the countrified Little Willies, the rockier El Madmo. “We were playing sports arenas in France, which was insane,” she says of her day job. “We set up our instruments backstage in some men’s locker room and would write silly pop songs that became the El Madmo record, trying to find ways to stay sane.”

Chasing Pirates (2009)

Jones’s “mind’s racing” on this song from The Fall, as a message from a lover leaves her “mixed up”. The sentiment could be anxious or anticipatory. “I was probably feeling both things, to be honest,” says Jones. She and Alexander had broken up, prompting her to seek an entirely new band and a different sound.

The Fall is darker and smokier than her previous albums, intermingling the spirits of Dusty Springfield and Massive Attack. It was also her first album primarily comprised of her own writing: she credits Ryan Adams, who plays on the album, with encouraging her when she felt insecure about her abilities. “It lifted me up as a songwriter and made me feel validated.” She says she doesn’t know much about the allegations against him. “It just wasn’t my experience with him. I feel bad for everybody involved.”

You can hear Jones coming into her own on The Fall, her dramatic vocals standing out instead of following the flow as she had on previous records. Performing covers, she says, “you’re listening to the sound of your voice a little more instead of delivering the lyrics”. But writing original material, “I was delivering the lyrics a little more”. Coming out of a relationship that she had been in for most of her 20s was jarring. “We had been together since before my first album came out, so then it became navigating who I was post-success, without that partner who was with me through it all,” she says. “It was a very strange time. But I had a lot of good friends who I knew from before, and in New York, there’s always some good music to go and hear.”

All a Dream (2012)

Jones’s fifth album, Little Broken Hearts, reinvented her process even more starkly. After collaborating with Danger Mouse, AKA Brian Burton, on his 2011 album Rome, she asked if he would work with her on a new set of songs that she had written. But Burton likes to start with a blank slate. “At the time I was a little confused, but once we started, I completely understood,” say Jones.

All a Dream was one of the first songs they made together: a noir meditation on the lingering effects of a bad love affair. They worked on the fly, prompting Jones to embrace roughness, using recordings that she had intended as scratch demos. It was a transformative experience. “Before, I was terrified of having to finish songs before I went into the studio,” she says. “Now, with the new album that I’m putting out, a lot of these songs were not finished. I went in having faith in the process and the lightning bolt of inspiration that comes with making music. I learned a lot of that from working with Brian.”

It’s a Wonderful Time for Love (2016)

Day Breaks was hailed as Jones’s return to jazz, although there is a sly maturity to the album, and especially Wonderful Time, that Jones says would have eluded her at 22. This song, she says, is the rare example of “something that happens when you capture exactly what you want, what you’re hearing in your head plus what other musicians play and bring to the table that you couldn’t even have imagined”.

One of those musicians was the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, whose solo albums – and work on Joni Mitchell’s early 90s records – are among Jones’s favourites. “He’s an incredible human,” she says. “My favourite thing about him is that he doesn’t play unless he’s feeling it. He’s not just gonna noodle around and find the tune, he’s gonna sit there and listen until he feels something and it moves him, and then he plays the most incredible thing. That’s different from anyone I’ve ever worked with.”

Wonderful Time scans as a love song, but it’s “more of a romantic humanity song”, says Jones. It was written as the US lurched towards Trumpism. “It’s more about: let’s lift each other up and send love to each other in a hard time,” she says. “Instead of saying: let’s get together romantically. It’s more than that.”

It Was You (2019)

On her seventh record, Jones applied the lessons she learned from Danger Mouse with such commitment that it is hard to call Begin Again an album. It is a collection of seven songs, made off the cuff in the studio with collaborators including Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and the pianist Thomas Bartlett. She released them one by one and compiled them later.

The title track, written with Emily Fiskio and produced by Jones, was a true bolt from the blue. “I didn’t know what it was about until after we recorded it.” She is shy about saying what it meant to her: “It feels a little bit like it’s about God to me.” There was no literal, spiritual shift in her life, “but I was definitely feeling a lot of things at the time, maybe a little sad about certain things in my life. I think as we get older, that comes in and out more and more: we think about our humanity and happiness and our family and our loved ones.”

Despite the heavy themes, the making of Begin Again only continued to lift any burden of expectation from Jones’s career. Releasing one track at a time, she was excited to embrace the possibilities offered by streaming services, “and also give myself a break”, she says. “To get inspired to make music without having a huge album arc. It really freed me up and made me more inspired than ever.”

Flame Twin (2020)

For her eighth album, Jones took some inspiration from an unlikely source. “Reading Dr Seuss stories to my children every night, I feel rhymes in my head constantly,” she says. That, plus the encouragement of a poet friend, led Jones to start writing her own poetry, which she turned into three of the songs on her new record. “I’m certainly not going to release a book of poetry at this point in my life,” she says emphatically.

Once again, Jones hadn’t intended to make an album – until she realised this group of songs “all matched”. The ad hoc assembly reminded her of a photograph her husband took of her on the ground, so she called the record Pick Me Up Off the Floor. It has a heavy mood, dramatic vocals, songs about division and irreconcilable differences. Jones has previously said: “If there’s a darkness to this album, it’s not meant to be an impending sense of doom. It feels more like a human longing for connection.”

It is an eerie sentiment for an album that is ultimately being released into social isolation. “It feels kind of silly to talk about my music when people are sick, but at the same time, music lifts people up and I hope that they connect to it,” says Jones. She and her husband have been listening to John Prine (this interview was done before his death from the virus), Townes Van Zandt and Guns N’ Roses. “It’s certainly been making me feel better in this weird time,” she says. “What are you gonna do except what you do, right?”